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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32143 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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The standardized testing score discrepancies are huge. If it weren't for affirmative action maybe 10% of the current black admitted students would have been accepted. So the other 90% are rightly called affirmative action admits. They are still above average compared to students at other colleges but they are not Harvard level by academic merit

There are discrepancies, but they're not really 'huge'. The average SAT score for black admits is 703.7, for white students 744.7, which is only 5.5% lower and probably puts the average black admit close to or in the top 5% of scores.

It's impossible to score a zero on the SAT so the percent difference is meaningless. What's more important is what percent b of blacks score above the white median? It's not many

The average SAT score for black admits is 703.7, for white students 744.7, which is only 5.5% lower

Average scores for black admits have been rising and the gap shrinking - whites are still around 745 but blacks look to be closer to 715 recently.

and probably puts the average black admit close to or in the top 5% of scores.

It does! 704 would be a composite score of 1408, which is around the top 3% of the country or top 6% of SAT takers. 1430 gets up to around 2% and 5%. If we look at higher precision data (from 2015; they don't publish enough significant figures anymore) it says about 5.9% of test takers get higher scores. That is very good!

But:

There are discrepancies, but they're not really 'huge'.

The differences in probability of getting scores near the SAT high end work out to huge differences in percentile. Asian and white Harvard admit scores are high enough to need that higher precision data. A 745 looks like a 1490 composite, top 2.75% of SAT takers; over 2x less common. The average Asian-American admit is around 1540, top 1% of SAT takers, over 5x less common. Saying "the other 90% are rightly called affirmative action admits" seems to be correct, but at least "the other 50% are" might be defensible.

I'd be fascinated to see it defended, though, because I don't see the obvious stopping point in between there and "80% of blacks are affirmative action admits, and so are 60% of whites". I'm not at all a fan of Harvard's century-spanning tradition of "The Jews Asians just don't have good personalities" excuses for putting thumbs on admissions scales, and I can't come up with any better scheme than "make admissions color-blind, maybe try to promote underprivileged populations based on family income or high school class rank or something also facially color-blind, and just hope we don't lose anything precious to Goodhart", but I suspect anyone who agreed with me because they expect the result to be a boon for white students would be disappointed. It's been decades since Bill Clinton noticed "there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans", and the Asian-American population has roughly tripled since, and the SAT gap between Asian- and white American test takers has slightly increased since.

(I can't come up with any better scheme that would have popular support, anyway. A lot of the benefit of the Ivy League seems to be "get the smartest kids in the same room with the richest and most well-connected kids and see what they end up making together", and we could try to formalize that with a rule like "everybody bid how much tuition you're willing to pay; the N kids with the highest f(tuition, objective_scores) are admitted", but I assume most people would scream bloody murder at the suggestion.)

The differences in probability of getting scores near the SAT high end work out to huge differences in percentile. Asian and white Harvard admit scores are high enough to need that higher precision data. A 745 looks like a 1490 composite, top 2.75% of SAT takers; over 2x less common. The average Asian-American admit is around 1540, top 1% of SAT takers, over 5x less common. Saying "the other 90% are rightly called affirmative action admits" seems to be correct, but at least "the other 50% are" might be defensible.

This is interesting to note, but I wonder at that end of the bell curve how much these small discrepancies in scores actually reveal. While the small number of very top scorers means that a 1490 scorer is 2x less common than a 1430 scorer, the question is whether how much 'better' an average 1490 scorer is than a 1430 scorer. Over a population level differences at the top might be able to be put down to actual differences in knowledge/ability but surely SAT-taking contains a sufficient level of randomness that 50 points doesn't tell you all that much.

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